RADIO
I made my debut in the fantasy sports world with baseball. It was the spring of 2003 and I was a freshman in high school when an old friend decided to start up a fantasy baseball league. Unsurprisingly, that fall, the same friend started up a fantasy football league. For the longest time, I considered the two to be somewhat equal. After all, I cared about them almost the same and put in a similar amount of effort. But I did not have similar levels of success. In fact, it's not even close. I was far more successful at fantasy baseball.
So why do I look forward to football season even more? Week 1 of the NFL season - particularly that first Sunday - I consider to be the single best sports day of the year. After about six months without football, we finally get it back. My favorite weekly activity is sitting on my friend's couch with a bunch of other guys, watching all of the games. I will never not be excited for that first kickoff at 1:00 and the constant flipping between games, trying to catch as many plays as possible. All of us are in multiple fantasy leagues together so there's almost always something relevant and exciting going on. A play may only last between five and 10 seconds, but something is always happening. The jokes, the camaraderie, and just the enjoyment of the game never gets old.
But what makes fantasy football so much more exciting than any other sport? There are a couple of factors that just can't be replicated in any other format and keeps us coming back for more.
Randomness
You would think randomness is a bad thing. Not when it comes to popularity. A fantasy baseball regular season is roughly 22 weeks. In a typical head to head league, a team will have over 60 innings pitched and over 200 at bats a week. While seven days is hardly a large sample size, more often than not, the better team will rise by the end of those seven days. If you don't really know what you're doing, it's virtually impossible to win.
That's not the case in fantasy football. The regular season is just 13 or 14 weeks long. Each team only has approximately 10 players each week. And the entire matchup pretty much occurs on Sunday with each player playing just one game a week. Anything can happen in just one game. All you have to do is outscore your opponent that week. You don't have to win the most categories like in baseball. Just score the most points. It makes it a lot easier for the people who don't have the time or desire to dedicate hours upon hours to studying and preparing for each season.
Convenience
If you want to be successful at fantasy baseball, you need to pay attention to just about every game every day. You need to check the waiver wire every day. You need to set your lineup every day. You need to manage your matchups (i.e., benching pitchers when you have a category locked up or benching hitters in extremely unfavorable matchups). You need to build your team to perform in multiple areas: runs, home runs, runs batted in, stolen bases, average, earned run average, strikeouts, walks+hits/innings pitched, quality starts, etc. There's a lot to track.
In fantasy football, you need to set your lineup once a week. You need to check the waiver wire once a week, usually Tuesday night. There's no real managing of your matchups outside of putting in the players you expect to score the most points. Speaking of points, that's all you need to concern yourself with. Sure, there are a multitude of ways to accumulate points, but it doesn't matter how you get there. If your baseball team steals thirty bases in a week, you'll win stolen bases, which is worth one category out of many. If one player scores twice and catches a ton of passes in a PPR league, you can win an entire week that way. If a goal-line specialist running back breaks the plane three times for touchdowns, you can win that way as well. It doesn't matter as long as the points are scored. You and I may spend hours every week studying and preparing, but your buddy can field and a full lineup and manage his team in as little as a 15 minutes a week (and then totally beat you and boast about how great he is). Fair? Maybe not, but it's a lot simpler to manage a fantasy football team than a fantasy baseball team and for many that's a huge plus.
Excitement!
Watching your baseball player hit a home run is fun. Watching your pitcher strike someone out is great. But those things pale in comparison to the euphoric feeling of watching your running back bust off a huge touchdown run or your wide receiver make a ridiculous catch. Ultimately, each event in football is so much more meaningful than each event in baseball. A ten yard reception matters more than a two run single. And let's just be honest with ourselves, what's more exciting than being in a close matchup that comes down to Monday Night Football? With only 16 games in a season versus 162 for baseball, each game carries with it much more significance. Each football play matters more than each baseball play (whether it be a pitch, hit, out, etc.). It's just a lot easier and more enjoyable to root for your quarterback to throw a touchdown so you can score points compared to rooting for your pitcher to record a high enough ratio of outs to walks and hits in order for you to win that category.
I've lost a fantasy football semi-final on a shanked Ryan Longwell extra point. I've also won a semi-final on a Justin Tucker 61 yard field goal. Come to think of it, I've had way too many close matchups decided by kickers, but that's a different article. There's just nothing comparable I can point to in baseball. If you've ever had a moment like that in a fantasy football matchup, you know exactly what I'm talking about. If you're a lifelong fantasy baseball player just getting into football or just new to fantasy in general, I encourage you to join a fantasy football league. Start with a basic 12-team snake redraft league. My preferred format is 0.5 PPR, but for your first league, standard or full PPR is just fine. Ideally, you'd want a league that drafts after the third week of the preseason as that's the last time you typically see starters (aka fantasy relevant players) in the exhibitions. Start thinking about it now because August will be here before you know it. There's no time like the present to dive into the excitement that is fantasy football.
